> Whenever someone offers you their opinion, a superb initial question paraphrases Morgan Housel: “what have you experienced that makes you believe what you do?” The profound usefulness of this simple question is that it immediately anchors abstract ideas back to real-world experience. Or reveals its absence; especially in non-practitioners like politicians or academics.
Worth knowing, but in many cases a person's experience with something amounts to little more than an anecdote.
I experienced a robbery in a restaurant, committed by a black man. Yes it really happened, but I should not generalize very much based on that experience -- or if I do, I need to be able to discern which attributes of the experience are incidental and which are relevant, and to weight one-off experiences differently from deep experience in an area of claimed expertise.
> This credo is essentially an appeal to authority
Strange, I read it as exactly the opposite. Many times, people who are considered authorities in something, such as academics, have little or no real world experience in the matters that they're giving advice on. For example, why should a business owner take advice from an economist, who has never run a business (or even worked outside of academia), on how to run a business? By asking "what have you experienced that makes you believe what you do?", we can at least establish if someone really knows something or is just an "authority".
Similarly, if I see a book about software development, I'd like to know what significant software the author has delivered. If their expertise is mostly in writing books and making YouTube videos, I don't want to waste my time reading their advice.
Ironically, the author of this article seems to work for a "wealth management group", so we should ask what experience they have that would make them a credible source of advice in psychology or brain function. They write nothing about their own actual experience, only quoting various authorities.
Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black to me.
"Morgan Housel
Author
Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. ...
Google Books
"
> a major problem we are seeing unfold in real time is that some influential, very high-IQ people often have limited awareness of exactly where their circle of competence ends.
As far as I can tell, this is nearly everybody's biggest flaw, high IQ or no. I think we just relish the chance to point out a "smart" person's limits more.
Well, there does seem to be a special Silicon Valley version of this where people get incredibly wealthy from their software/web businesses and conclude all they need to do is get into <some other radically-different field> and they'll get that "figured out" just as easily. It's a unique kind of hubris that doesn't usually pan out.
Alternate title for this article: mental shortcuts for arriving at a conclusion without actually applying logic or reasoning.
For example:
> This leads to a stunning possibility implied by the opening quote. True expert intuition may often be associated with poor explanations. We should therefore be extremely suspicious of neat explanations in the broadest domains.
Does anyone think this is actually a valid or plausible argument for its conclusion? "Expert explanations sometimes don't seem to make sense, therefore don't trust explanations that seem to broadly make sense?"
I understand the value of heuristics, but they're a crutch. You shouldn't be using crutches or wheelchairs all the time when you can walk (i.e. use logic). If you don't walk, your legs will wither away.
> Does anyone think this is actually a valid or plausible argument for its conclusion? "Expert explanations sometimes don't seem to make sense, therefore don't trust explanations that seem to broadly make sense?"
I read this a bit differently: Experts often have a hard time explaining their intuitions. That is, they (presumably, as experts) have the correct intuition, but can’t articulate their internal reasoning (and maybe the correct explanation is inherently difficult to understand), while on the other hand it is not very hard to come up with a seemingly coherent ("neat") explanation for pretty much anything. If that is indeed true (I don’t know that it is), then having a "neat" explanation presented could really be a counter-indication, statistically speaking.
I’m halfway sympathetic to that, as "neat" explanations do quite often oversimplify, and reality usually turns out to be more complex. Explanations that also point out their own limitations and caveats tend to inspire higher credence.
I think this is what the article alludes to. There is the famous example of some expert on Rembrandt (or some other painter) that could tell that a specific painting was a forgery, but was not able to pinpoint why he felt that way. (This anecdote might have been in the introduction of some book on intuition, something Malcolm Gladwell-ish, but I can't recall which...)
Some things do have simple neat correct explanations though. So it reduces to a tautology - "be suspicious of simple explanations in areas where you wouldn't expect a simple explanation to work".
I’d argue that as a non-expert you can’t really assess whether a simple explanation would work or not, and therefore you’d have to be suspicious about having expectations that it would.
If you lack expertise enough to say if a simple explanation works, you lack expertise in complex ones too, and should probably stop trying to guess what's right based on very weak signals. Which was my original point.
Being unable to explain a standpoint is a deal breaker. Even if you’re an expert with good intuition, you should be able to translate that intuition into a coherent argument. I think we don’t do a good enough job of holding people to this bar.
Thus I think there needs to be two criteria here: is the argument plausible, and is backed by evidence or demonstrated expertise. Not just one or the other.
This reasoning seems to apply in non-scientific fields, where it’s hard or impossible to refute. Power Poses to induce confidence (from Amy Cuddy) comes to mind, which was ultimately debunked. Or the asinine advice that forcing a smile will make you happy.
> > This leads to a stunning possibility implied by the opening quote. True expert intuition may often be associated with poor explanations. We should therefore be extremely suspicious of neat explanations in the broadest domains.
> Does anyone think this is actually a valid or plausible argument for its conclusion?
Not particularly. Most critically, it is in itself a neat explanation.
tldr; intuition qua pattern recognition is often better than analysis
but isn't as amenable to explanation.
Even if this were true, and it's certainly not in the context of fundamental investing, it's what asset managers call untradeable knowledge, e.g., an
existence theorem for a number with no tractable means of finding it.
I have experienced this before - someone who was great at selling their work - but everything quickly fell apart when you started looking at it closely and asking the right questions.
I think that this type of behavior can be advantageous in a couple of ways. It gets started on a higher rung of the ladder of perceived competence and trust, and that advantage can be compounded over time. The drawback is that over time they start to get a reputation as a bullshitter and people do not trust them to do anything that actually needs to work. And your reputation tends to follow you.
That being said, these types of people can be very valuable members of a team and excel if given the right role and responsibilities.
> these types of people can be very valuable members of a team and excel if given the right role and responsibilities
I'm curious about what roles you think someone like this could bring value to. If "people do not trust them to do anything that actually needs to work", aren't they a liability to the team?
Sales-like roles are usually a good fit. Leadership if they are aware of their limitations. Also useful in planning / strategy because they usually have a good sense of what is hot / what will sell. Main thing is that you them want to have them with someone who is competent, and they have to trust and be willing to defer.
> We have an infinite palette of emotions and sensations, yet only a handful of words to describe them. (I am English, therefore particularly disadvantaged.)
That strikes me as wrong - English is the language with the most words. Why would it be particularly poor in describing the emotional realm? (Presumably, the author means that the English with their stiff upper lip don't have much awareness of their emotions, but the author is specifically referring to words.)
My intuition agrees with the quoted statement. I cannot make a coherent logical argument for it, but I agree with the author: other languages have a richer, more nuanced vocabulary for emotions.
There are emotional-labels that only exist in other languages (e.g. German, Japanese, Russian, Ancient Greek, etc.) that simply have no equal in English (and in that case, we simply steal the word and pump up our total word count).
I feel like English's main purpose is to get people to do things, by making them feel a certain way, or by being so vague and unspecific it can be interpreted in an endless amount of ways. Whereas with German it might be to be exact, and to have every single thing accounted for and labeled.
Sources of Power by Gary Klein is an absolutely fascinating book for leaders, and covers this topic in depth: how experts use intuition and how they work to articulate and distribute that to others to build up similar expertise.
Just two of the interesting observations...
Experts conduct better pre-mortems - that is, given scenarios where eventually something failed, they are able to more accurately predict which parts of the scenario contributed to the failure.
And experts are "two steps ahead" in troubleshooting - which makes it (paradoxically) harder to convince others their direction is correct.
Anyway, great book on the topic, essential reading in my mind.
> not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style
Which apparently is not orange block paragraphs. Paragraphs that are not highlights of the black text as you've come to expect. That one got me. And then I realized it was a reflexive statement about catching me. A textual fish trap? I laughed.
34 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] threadI experienced a robbery in a restaurant, committed by a black man. Yes it really happened, but I should not generalize very much based on that experience -- or if I do, I need to be able to discern which attributes of the experience are incidental and which are relevant, and to weight one-off experiences differently from deep experience in an area of claimed expertise.
GP isn't appealing to authority, he's suggesting a way to get to the heart of epistemological differences.
Strange, I read it as exactly the opposite. Many times, people who are considered authorities in something, such as academics, have little or no real world experience in the matters that they're giving advice on. For example, why should a business owner take advice from an economist, who has never run a business (or even worked outside of academia), on how to run a business? By asking "what have you experienced that makes you believe what you do?", we can at least establish if someone really knows something or is just an "authority".
Similarly, if I see a book about software development, I'd like to know what significant software the author has delivered. If their expertise is mostly in writing books and making YouTube videos, I don't want to waste my time reading their advice.
Ironically, the author of this article seems to work for a "wealth management group", so we should ask what experience they have that would make them a credible source of advice in psychology or brain function. They write nothing about their own actual experience, only quoting various authorities.
"Morgan Housel Author Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. ... Google Books "
For example:
> This leads to a stunning possibility implied by the opening quote. True expert intuition may often be associated with poor explanations. We should therefore be extremely suspicious of neat explanations in the broadest domains.
Does anyone think this is actually a valid or plausible argument for its conclusion? "Expert explanations sometimes don't seem to make sense, therefore don't trust explanations that seem to broadly make sense?"
I understand the value of heuristics, but they're a crutch. You shouldn't be using crutches or wheelchairs all the time when you can walk (i.e. use logic). If you don't walk, your legs will wither away.
I read this a bit differently: Experts often have a hard time explaining their intuitions. That is, they (presumably, as experts) have the correct intuition, but can’t articulate their internal reasoning (and maybe the correct explanation is inherently difficult to understand), while on the other hand it is not very hard to come up with a seemingly coherent ("neat") explanation for pretty much anything. If that is indeed true (I don’t know that it is), then having a "neat" explanation presented could really be a counter-indication, statistically speaking.
I’m halfway sympathetic to that, as "neat" explanations do quite often oversimplify, and reality usually turns out to be more complex. Explanations that also point out their own limitations and caveats tend to inspire higher credence.
Thus I think there needs to be two criteria here: is the argument plausible, and is backed by evidence or demonstrated expertise. Not just one or the other.
Feels obvious once I write it out, to be honest.
> Does anyone think this is actually a valid or plausible argument for its conclusion?
Not particularly. Most critically, it is in itself a neat explanation.
Even if this were true, and it's certainly not in the context of fundamental investing, it's what asset managers call untradeable knowledge, e.g., an existence theorem for a number with no tractable means of finding it.
I think that this type of behavior can be advantageous in a couple of ways. It gets started on a higher rung of the ladder of perceived competence and trust, and that advantage can be compounded over time. The drawback is that over time they start to get a reputation as a bullshitter and people do not trust them to do anything that actually needs to work. And your reputation tends to follow you.
That being said, these types of people can be very valuable members of a team and excel if given the right role and responsibilities.
I'm curious about what roles you think someone like this could bring value to. If "people do not trust them to do anything that actually needs to work", aren't they a liability to the team?
That strikes me as wrong - English is the language with the most words. Why would it be particularly poor in describing the emotional realm? (Presumably, the author means that the English with their stiff upper lip don't have much awareness of their emotions, but the author is specifically referring to words.)
There are emotional-labels that only exist in other languages (e.g. German, Japanese, Russian, Ancient Greek, etc.) that simply have no equal in English (and in that case, we simply steal the word and pump up our total word count).
I feel like English's main purpose is to get people to do things, by making them feel a certain way, or by being so vague and unspecific it can be interpreted in an endless amount of ways. Whereas with German it might be to be exact, and to have every single thing accounted for and labeled.
I guess emotional precision is too costly for the political class lol
Just two of the interesting observations...
Experts conduct better pre-mortems - that is, given scenarios where eventually something failed, they are able to more accurately predict which parts of the scenario contributed to the failure.
And experts are "two steps ahead" in troubleshooting - which makes it (paradoxically) harder to convince others their direction is correct.
Anyway, great book on the topic, essential reading in my mind.
Which apparently is not orange block paragraphs. Paragraphs that are not highlights of the black text as you've come to expect. That one got me. And then I realized it was a reflexive statement about catching me. A textual fish trap? I laughed.